Leopold Aschenbrenner is getting married this weekend in Carmel, California to Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Fortune first reported their engagement in October. It is, the Wall Street Journal reports, a lavish affair fit for the AI power couple: beginning, naturally, with a colloquium of panels and breakouts, a ceremony at a Tuscan-style villa, and a send-off to their honeymoon at a forest spa retreat.
But the groom is set to tie the knot after having spent this entire week desperate to keep his fund afloat.
The 20-something became known as the “Nostradamus” of AI after building his hedge fund, Situational Awareness, to $45 billion in capital on a concentrated bet on hot memory chip and data center names, like CoreWeave and SK Hynix. The Journal reports he was leveraged three to four times on these bets, borrowing three to four dollars for every dollar of capital.
For two years that worked. But in the week of Aschenbrenner’s wedding, a black swan event came. As traders agitated over all the AI infrastructure spending without clear returns, they pushed memory stocks and even Big Tech names like SK Hynix and SanDisk down by 30%. The semiconductor sector even had its worst month since 2002. Rival traders figured out what he owned and shorted it, the Journal reported, betting that he would have to sell. The pressure continued: banks began demanding more collateral, so he sold stock to meet the calls, only pushing prices down further. In a Thursday letter to investors, which Reuters first reported, Aschenbrenner compared it to a bank run—”vulnerability begetting more vulnerability.”
By Wednesday, he was trying to sell whatever he could. Bloomberg reported he approached Sequoia and Greenoaks about buying private stakes, including a $3.5 billion slice of his $ billion Anthropic stake. But that deal fell apart, and his backers Patrick and John Collison, the Stripe founders, spent hours at his offices as he negotiated with Citadel and Millennium well past midnight, the Journal reported.
Ultimately, Citadel won. Before Thursday’s open, Ken Griffin bought the bulk of his public portfolio at more than 10% below market value, the Journal reported. Aschenbrenner used the cash to pay off his lenders. The fund survived with just $10 billion, the Journal reported, keeping that Anthropic stake intact.
On Thursday, as his guests began arriving in Carmel, he wrote another letter to investors, the Journal reported. His shorts and his leverage were gone, he wrote, and the fund was down 67% on the month, but still up 80% on the year. He was not liquidated and the fund would not shut down, but he offered one-on-one phone calls in the coming week—the same week he’s supposedly on his spa honeymoon. “I take full responsibility for these events,” he wrote.
Now Aschenbrenner is at his wedding. Likely his investors, his colleagues, and his guests are the same people; he met his fiancée at the FTX Future Fund, and his fund was seeded by the Collisons, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. He shared an office with the podcaster Dwarkesh Patel and hosted happy hours for OpenAI and Anthropic researchers, Fortune reported in October.
It is a small world. Neither Situational Awareness nor Anthropic responded to Fortune’s request for comment. But Balwit has joked about the tight circle before. On X, she wrote that she was asking her wedding planners to make it “European Garden,” but it’s on the cusp of the singularity. “Our wedding planners nod sagely, they are taking notes,” she wrote. “They think we have lost it.”
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